


Only One Life to Live

by QueenofCheese (Supertights), Supertights



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Jumanji Fusion, Endgame Sheith, F/M, Gen, M/M, Not Beta Read, Not Canon Compliant, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, background Adashi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22122298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Supertights/pseuds/QueenofCheese, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Supertights/pseuds/Supertights
Summary: When Shiro finds an old gaming console in the desert on a joyride with Keith, he can't know how much trouble it will bring them.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	Only One Life to Live

**Author's Note:**

> Things I should be writing: And I'll be the head, Slow night, I am flesh, etc.
> 
> Things I began writing on a whim instead: A Jumanji AU.
> 
> Goals related to this fic: I need to go see the new Jumanji movie sometime.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a game finds a new sucker to play it.

The edge of the game stuck out of the sand, weathered and chipped. Catching his toes on a sharp corner, Shiro hopped across the sand for a few minutes, screeching in agony. 

Leaning against his bike, Keith sipped at a bottle of water, watching Shiro lurch around. "That’s for taking your boots off and subjecting mother nature to the smell of your feet." 

Shiro gasped, multitasking his mock outrage with falling on his butt, clutching his foot. "My feet don’t smell!"

Keith gave him a crooked smile, shrugging. "Whatever you say."

The sky rumbled overhead, like drums beating ominously. 

When Shiro could walk again, albeit with a limp, he returned to see what had given him almost mortal injury, running a finger around the sides. Freed, it lifted away from the sand, the long cables connecting it to similarly buried controllers. "Hey Keith…." he called, showing the find to his unimpressed friend. "What do you think?"

"I think someone threw out some trash and you tripped over it." Keith’s lips thinned and his nose scrunched up as another rumble had him looking at the fast clouding sky. He started his hoverbike. "Race you, old timer."

"Hmmm, what? Hey!" Shiro shoved the game in the storage compartment and gunned his bike after Keith, making it back into the Garrison parking garage moments before the storm hit. The rain fell in sheets beyond the vast door as they parked up. "Just in time."

"Yeah. I’ll see you later, Shiro. I have a late class."

"Detention isn’t a late class, Keith."

"Laugh it up, old man, it's for extra credit not detention."

Shiro stumbled dramatically against his younger friend in fake shock. "What? Extra credit? Did I hear that right?"

He gained another crooked smile and a wave as Keith jogged towards the dorms and Shiro returned to his own quarters in the officer’s block. There, Adam was even less enthusiastic than Keith. "It’s not vintage, Takashi, vintage implies value. Throw it in the trash."

"It could be valuable to the right person." Shiro held the console to his chest protectively. "You and Keith, when did you get on the same page about anything? I’m going to open it later, clean it all up. I bet I’ll be playing tonight. Too bad only _one_ of the controllers will be operational by then." He grinned to take the sting out of his reply.

Adam eyed the broken machine with a smirk. "We’ll see how that works out for you."

When Shiro returned to their empty quarters after classes, simulations, dinner, and a late meeting with Sam, he found the game noticeably cleaner than he’d left it. A small mountain of sand and debris was piled on the floor in front of the desk. "Huh, maybe Adam took pity on me after all." It also looked slimmer and more compact but he had to have imagined that. Unscrewing the top, he found the inner workings miraculously clear of corrosion and sand. "Time to power this bad boy up... but how."

He’d heard of devices having power cables in the dim dark past, before any smart surface could potentially be a recharge station. He was going to need some form of adaptor... Shiro turned away to look for his personal comm because a call to Matt was also call to Katie. 

And Katie Holt could solve _any_ technical problem for enough incentive.

Behind him, he heard the snap and hiss of power discharge and spun to find the game not only powered up but projecting onto his wall. The title credits looked old. "I knew it. Vintage!" But neither Adam nor Keith were around to hear him crow about it. "Voltron-ji? Sounds fake but okay," he murmured. The screen cycled to a character list. 

The door chimed and Shiro looked between the game and the door regretfully before setting the controller back down. As he walked away, a second controller slithered across the desk.

"Oh hey, I was just gonna call you, you won’t believe what I found."

It was midnight when Keith packed his bag and left the dorms for the Garrison garage. Shiro’s bike sat under a canvas where he'd left it, gathering dust next to Keith’s. Neither had been touched since their last ride, up until last weekend when he pulled back the cover and painstakingly restored both to full capacity.

As he cleared the corner, having avoided every sentry on the way out, he caught a snatch of conversation. A bit too loud, the voices all too familiar.

"Shiro was my friend too, I’m coming."

"One, you didn’t even know Shiro. Two, Keith doesn’t trust either of you."

A gasp, then, "Keith and I are best friends."

"I thought I was your best friend."

Keith came across the floor fast and pointed at the three cadets lingering near his bike. "Katie, you and I, that’s what I said."

"You’re late, and about that, they invited themselves, Keith, apparently you’re all best friends."

"We’re not friends. How did they know?" 

When both cadets tried to reply at the same time, Keith held up his hand to stop them. Hunk was a gassy engineering genius and amazing stress baker who provided study snacks. As study group leader, Keith got first dibs on what Hunk made, win win in his opinion. The cadet was smart and thought outside the box and if Keith was going to find Shiro, he needed fresh insights. That, and Katie liked Hunk, their brains worked in a strange harmony when they were together. 

Lance, however, was a pain in the ass. An up and coming former cargo pilot gunning for the top slot but still a firm second behind Keith, and pouting about it to whoever would listen. He was loud and annoying and got on Keith’s nerves constantly. 

Keith scowled. "Hunk, did you pack snacks?"

Hunk unzipped a bag that appeared to be full of baked goodness.

"You’re in. Lance...."

"Wait! Hear me out. I bring--" Lance appeared thoughtful for a moment. "Silence," he finished with a dark smile. "If you leave me behind, I’m telling _everyone_."

With a groan, Keith muttered, "Fine. You’re in. All of you on my bike." Lance reached out to touch Shiro’s bike and Keith growled at him. "Don’t touch it, no one touches Shiro’s bike. No one but Shiro."

Holding up his hands, Lance backed away. Somehow they made it to Keith’s shack of operations in one piece despite Lance screaming all the way there, and Hunk almost falling off at one point in the journey. Lance kissed the dirt as he crawled off the back of the bike, mumbling thanks to whatever Gods he prayed to.

Katie set up her equipment quickly and cracked her knuckles. "Right. Snack break."

"But we haven’t even started…."

She grinned at him, "Keith, that’s the best time to have a snack. Especially if it’s one Hunk made for us. I work better when I’m not starving."

Hunk preened visibly at the praise even as Keith growled, she ignored him and she and Hunk opened the bag of baking, lifting containers out and stacking them on the table. Lance was skulking around the edges of the room when he screeched and reached into a box of stuff clearly labeled 'Shirogane, T.'

"Where did you get a Mercury Gameflux II console in mint condition?"

Katie scrambled across the room towards Lance, tripping and catching herself several times until she stood next to Lance, drooling over the console. "What the hell, Keith? I thought we were friends."

Keith looked at them both blankly. "That’s the piece of junk Shiro picked up in the desert the day he disappeared. At least I think it is." It looked different though, noticeably chunkier from when Adam had boxed up the rest of Shiro’s belongings for storage.

"This is not junk!" cried Lance, holding the game to his chest.

"JUNK?!" Katie appeared, for the first time, speechless, spluttering at Keith. "It’s like I don’t even know you anymore, Keith!"

He gestured at her impolitely and she returned it twice over, then pushed everything off the one low table Keith had prepped for working at, allowing for Lance to set the console down with gentle hands. It began to load when she turned it on. "I hope it has Killbot Phantasm I on it!" She snatched up a controller and waited as the screen loaded, projecting onto the back wall of Keith’s shack. Lance picked up two more and passed one to Hunk who took his reluctantly with a guilt laden glance at Keith. "Voltron-ji? Sounds fake, but okay," murmured Katie.

"Guys. Guys. _GUYS_!" He had his hands on his hips, he was a study group leader, he'd broken one of Shiro's records. 

"Keith, resistance is futile. Take a controller and join us. We have cookies." Katie was hard to understand with a giant chocolate chip cookie in her mouth. "I promise we’ll look for Shiro as soon as we have one game down. You think it’s not important to me? Shiro wasn’t the only one who disappeared. It’s everything to me okay. I pinky promise, Keith." To prove it, she held up her pinky finger for him. "I just-- look, I just need to centre myself and this is how I do it best."

He didn’t even know where to start. Star Wars and Star Trek mixed metaphors but Hunk _did_ have more cookies. "Shiro…." he mumbled weakly, "He’s relying on us. We have to find him."

She’d turned away though, to stare at the list of game play characters. "Oh my God, do they know how culturally insensitive that is? Giovanni Ferrari? As the only one in the room with any Italian blood in their DNA, I call dibs on the Italian." Katie clicked.

"I want to be Moose Finbar!" Hunk clicked and the character was his. "Choose, Keith."

Keith clicked randomly and Lance screeched again, more deafening that the last time. "KEITH! You took the one I wanted!"

"Looks like no one can change after they pick so you’re Dr Oberon, curvy genius, Lance," snorted Katie, she found a dusty worn cushion and sat on the floor. "Come on, let’s play."

Lance pouted at her and selected the last available character, grumbling as he sat down next to Hunk.

The drums in the game began to get louder and louder, the shack shaking with the volume. "Good sound, loud, nice," bellowed Katie, focused on the game.

Looking around the room, Keith became concerned that the entire building was going to shake itself to pieces. "Can we turn it down though, my Dad built this place?" he asked plaintively. "Seriously, Katie, turn it down!"

"Katie, what’s up with your hands…" Hunk bent to get a closer look. "Like, I don’t mean to alarm anyone but they’re DISINTEGRATING!" 

It was too late, all of them were beginning to break down, their component atoms being sucked into the game console, which devoured them one by one hungrily. "Well," said Katie, as her face, her mouth, vanished, the words lingering after. "I think we can guess what happened...."

‘To Shiro,’ thought Keith, before he was broken down and transported.

He was falling, his arms pinwheeling as he tried to slow himself but he was coming down too fast and from very high, and with the single glance time allowed him, into dense jungle below. He was about to die and not the way life had intended. Broad leaf foliage slapped him all the way down until he landed with a boom that echoed through the jungle. Landed like a boss, he brushed the dust from his shorts and straightened up.

"I’m alive. Whoa." Somehow it took more than a fall from the upper atmosphere, and crashing into a hard pan surface albeit a heavily forested one, at what he was guessing was about 25 meters per second squared, to get rid of him. He did a 360 turn, checking out his surroundings. Yup. Still a jungle. It was time to make a plan and get out of here.

The sky chimed and flashed above him, a figure appearing in the blue. They screamed all the way down to land a short distance away, though landing was generous since they'd hit the ground with their face. He winced in sympathy, clearly not a boss. The woman sat up and glared at him, pushing her long black hair out of the way only for it fall back and frame her dirt smudged features perfectly. Dark eyes flashed annoyance and got up to stalk across the small clearing in his direction. "Who the hell are you?"

"Uh."

She stepped up and grabbed his shirt, wrenching him closer. "And where the hell is Takashi Shirogane, lady?"

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up on twitter: @bladeomarmorass
> 
> Edit: Sorry, I hated the name almost from the moment I clicked post, changed it.


End file.
